Quit Wasting My Healthcare

Chronic Disease Management

Jacob Kuriyan, PhD, president and chief executive of Physmark Inc., wrote an opinion piece for the LA Times titled “New rules for healthcare” (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oew-kuriyan7-2008jul07,1,1295924.story).  The basic theme of the article was that the best way to control costs would be to allow employers and insurers to focus on chronically ill patients (80% of healthcare costs) instead of standard risk categories based on age and sex.  By controlling the costs of chronic diseases through “market forces”, overall healthcare costs would go down.

If you ignore the debate over whether market forces or universal healthcare is the fundamental answer to controlling costs, one can interpret this article as a traditional plug for a classic disease management program.   Disease Management and Wellness programs both focus on getting more, lower intensity services today in place of major, higher cost services in the future.  While this may be a real value proposition to employers and society with a long-term view, there is still an opportunity to control healthcare costs today by being smarter, more financially accountable consumers and taking advantages of cost discrepancies in even low intensity service categories.  Employers and society can control healthcare costs and create behavior change under the existing healthcare model if they just empower and incent their employees to be cost-conscious healthcare consumers – the cost discrepancies and savings opportunities in today’s healthcare market are tremendous (drug cost vary in the hundreds, imaging costs vary by thousands, and surgeries can vary by tens of thousands).